Aside from stuff I wrote in my collaboration biography, I came across the following archives this week while in-preparation for another event, the EcoGov Lab-GREEN meeting on June 4, 2022.
Lauren Infantino's presentation on environmental justice solutions pathway made me think about what types of qualitative research have been useful for impact-based EJ pathways. During EiJ-A this Winter (2022), our class annotated Engaged scholarship which included a few examples of how engaged qualitative research using oral history impacted environmental justice, such as Suzanne Marshall's work to fight Sweet Valley, Alabama; and a GIS-based mapping project by the Winneman Wintu tribe in California. Searching about the earlier led to this article where Marshall's work is mentioned in a footnote. Searching about the Winneman tribe led to this page: http://www.datacenter.org/winnemem-wintu-tribe-begins-sacred-mapping-storytelling/
I skimmed through the DataCenter, a forty-year old but now-defunct independent research organization for social justice organizing and grassroots movement that was based in Oakland, California. Their archival contents seem to be distributed all over the place now:
"DataCenter sent some material to other locations as well. Rini Templeton, an incredible graphic artist whose drawings have been used by activists, primarily in the United States, Mexico and Central America, had a close relationship with DataCenter for many years. We sent our assembly of her drawings to UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) which holds a Rini Templeton collection. We sent posters by Clayton Van Lydegraf, a political activist based in the Pacific Northwest, to the Clayton Van Lydegraf archive at the University of Washington Labor Archives. Archivist and activist poster expert Lincoln Cushing received the rest of DataCenter’s poster collection."
Mike Fortun's further exploration into this informed that DataCenter came out of NACLA, an "archiving social movement" that animated Central American resistance movements. An article written by then-undergraduate student and now-Rhodes scholar Kate Reed argues that:
"NACLA plays an important role in countering mainstream historic narratives, providing a direct window into histories of resistance and an invaluable tool for educating a new generation of activists and engaged scholars."
Why am I using this example to explain my archiving impulse?
Well, for one, it coincides with the frustration I felt while finding data on environmental and science education--there is a lot but it's spread all over the place. The silo-ing is not even intentional; it's hard to imagine what kind of data would count here as it quickly gets overwhelming depending on scope and depth. Or it could be a bunch of stuff about the same thing being distributed over people's homes, offices, and cloud storages. If one were to reconstruct the DataCenter archive, which is now a part of many archives, there wouldn't just be one organization or orientation of the archive that would look and feel right and make sense--there would be plural organizations and orientations that would make sense. Which is where PECE can be beautifully leveraged.
For second, I like the memory pathway that sent me this archive; it reveals my interest in pedagogy of the archive: how to tell plural stories to anticipate and cultivate different ends? The fact that this is a "radical" archive betrays my interest in a certain sensibility, which inhabits clarity about "what needs to be done".
